The Stories of the Samsung Employees and Partners Working to Bring Relief to COVID-Struck India

Just as people are at the heart of everything Samsung does, people are also what can be relied upon when communities are faced with hardship. This has been most recently observed across India, when Samsung Electronics employees and partners mustered resources and went to the aid of their neighbors amid the country’s second wave of COVID-19.

Read on to learn about some of the remarkable ways these normal people have been reaching out to their friends and neighbors to do what they can to help alleviate the struggles brought about by the pandemic.

From Samsung Call Center Workers to Emergency Fact Checkers

As the second wave of COVID swelled across India, the need for cohesive lists of available hospitals, supplies and other crucial information prompted Samsung to establish their Samsung Covid Support Group helpdesks. But the team quickly came to realize that their existing lists were in desperate need of verification – and fast.

In order to help overcome this challenge, five Samsung call center workers were called upon to verify the existing lists in order to allow people to access relief. Even as some of the team members’ own family battled COVID, the team set out to update the availability of supplies, managing to cut the lists to 20 percent of their original size.

Despite the daunting nature of this task, the team continues to verify and edit these crucial lists on a weekly basis. The information is being shared with both service providers and Samsung employees all over the nation who further distribute it to those who need it. The work of Samsung India’s call center task group demonstrates how a small, concentrated effort can come to help a lot of people.

Encouraging People to Donate Plasma Through the Power of Social Media

While donating plasma following the recovery of several of his family members from COVID, Samsung sales manager Manik Kanade was reminded of a key message from his childhood favorite book, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Jungle Book’, that centers around the idea of helping others.

Having understood how important plasma donation was to those undergoing treatment for COVID, Kanade was inspired and took to several forms of social media in order to dispel misconceptions about the plasma donation process, subsequently gathering a group of over 3,000 willing volunteers to help spread the message.

In April and May, at the peak of the second swell of COVID in India, Kanade’s efforts saw over 200 volunteers donate plasma to help others. Thanks to the network he has built in his area providing information and support about COVID relief, Kanade has become the go-to for COVID relief information in his area.

Distributing Food to Those in Need

Samsung partner Samsu Ali is the successful business owner of Chennai Mobiles, a chain of smartphone retail stores in the southern Indian city of Coimbatore. But he did not have the easiest start in life; as a child, he spent his time working odd jobs in order to prevent himself and his family from going hungry.

Understanding that the lockdowns throughout 2020 and 2021 that the pandemic has precipitated would hit those who live on the streets the hardest, Ali is now using his position to help give back to his community. Having mustered 40 of his employees as volunteers, he and his team prepare food and distribute it through as many affected neighborhoods as possible.

As well as providing food for around 700 to 800 people a day, Ali is also providing groceries and financial aid to the people of his city. Ali is one of the many Samsung partners in India – whose cumulative store count in India totals over 200,000 – who have engaged in philanthropic work since the start of the COVID pandemic.

Delivering Food Made by Family to COVID Relief Camps

Samsung intern Yashjeet Varshney has fond memories of the community kitchens his parents loved setting up when he was a child. When the second wave of the pandemic came around and a neighbor was admitted to a relief camp for treatment with no one to feed his children, it came as natural for Varshney and his mother to provide food for the kids and their father.

Upon arrival at the relief camp, however, Varshney could not help but wonder how many of the other patients were in need of food, and so he and his mother decided to step in. With his mother preparing nutritious meals, Varshney packs and delivers them to the relief camp – all while attending virtual meetings as part of his Samsung internship.

Even contracting and recuperating from COVID did not stop Varshney, who instead got back to work at his family food delivery system as soon as he recovered with a renewed sense of how important the gestures he and his family were able to make were to the people in the relief camp.

The efforts of Samsung employees and partners in India to provide assistance during the country’s second COVID-19 wave show how small, coordinated actions taken in a timely manner can come to have a huge impact.

Along with the people-first attitudes of their employees and partners, the company itself has also pledged 5 million USD to help India overcome the challenges brought about by the second wave of COVID in the country, added new Samsung Smart Healthcare centers at government hospitals for faster diagnosis at government hospitals and vaccinated over 50,000 employees and their family members.